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Description

Please note, enter the Abbotsford Convent via Gate 2 closest to the creek, to arrive at the Industrial School rear entry.

Exposing a single viewer at a time to a multifaceted array of disintegrating inner voices.

You’re invited to experience the polyphony of the mind. You’ll be plunged into darkness and subjected to an array of disorienting voices in an audible manifestation of internal proliferation. In the space between awareness and uncertainty emerges the opportunity for questioning the vocality of your internal narrators, and for an opening up to the imagination required to select which past voices you want to continue to resonate into the future, and why.

Held Down, Expanding is a new installation by Thembi Soddell that explores states of trauma and mental distress, and how these may be imagined sonically. The work focuses on the malleability of perception by exposing the listener to a situation of auditory uncertainty. This is a space of breakdown between what is real, and what is projected, expected, presumed or assumed.

Held Down, Expanding is a controlled sound art experience that places the listener inside a subconscious mind straining against the force of multiple voices. Led into a darkened room, audience members are seated within an unnerving structure that surrounds them with multiple speakers. The lights are turned out, and a shifting, abstract sound world takes hold.

There are no clear anchors in time or space and no certainty as to what is being said or heard. As the sound ends, light returns. The listener is asked to record their experience to become part of an expanding document of response displayed outside the room. This document invites reflection on the voices that shape our perception and who, or what, may be in control.

Thembi Soddell (b.1980) is an Australian sound artist, electroacoustic composer and researcher with an interest in psychology, perception, extreme emotion and the subjectivity of experience. She works primarily with the sampler, generating sounds from field recordings, instrument textures, played found objects and synthesis to form surreal and ambiguous realisations of place and experience. These volatile, filmic sound worlds often exploit the dynamic extremes, toying with a listener’s sense of expectation and disquiet.

Polythinking is a Liquid Architecture investigation lead by Danni Zuvela.

Polyphonic Social is an annual Liquid Architecture program in partnership with Abbotsford Convent supported by the City of Yarra through the Creative Yarra grants program.

'Held Down, Expanding' is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

We acknowledge the Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung, Taungurong, Dja Dja Wurrung and the Wathaurung people of the Kulin Nation as the custodians of the land in which this event takes place, and we recognise that sovereignty was never ceded. We pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.